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Back to the Future: Criticism, the Canon, and the Nineteenth-Century

Spanish Novel. By: Gold, Hazel. Hispanic Review. Spring1990, Vol. 58 Issue 2,
p179-204. 26p. Abstract: Focuses on the forces that shape the canon of
nineteenth-century Spanish novel. Schematic survey of the historical reception of
the realist novel dating from the 1870s; Closely-intertwined fates of
contemporary literary theory, realism and the novel form. (AN: 9604085352)

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ONE of the most frequently-addressed topics in literary studies today is the whys
and wherefores of the canon: where it has already been (the story of the
establishment of the original, authoritative, Christian canon, followed by the
emergence of an alternative, secular canon beginning in the eighteenth century)
and where it is going now (the debate over its legitimacy and its continued ability
to classify knowledge or monitor human values). The case of the nineteenthcentury novel in Spain oilers in this respect a fruitful field of inquiry, in that it is
particularly compelling as an example of a genre that has swung widely between
extremes of great favor and utter disrepute over a relatively brief period of time.
It has variously been charged as having everything, or nothing, to say to its
readers, depending upon who was evaluating it and when.

A schematic survey of the historical reception of the realist novel dating from the
1870s, followed by a synchronic look at the closely-intertwined fates of
contemporary literary theory, realism, and the novel form, together suggest a
picture of how and for what purposes value has come to be assigned to this
particular class of literary texts. Implicated in the earliest construction of a realist
canon in Spain were notions of social reformism, literary taste-making, and
ideological control. The lines of this canon in its current incarnation are not quite
so clearly drawn. The novels and authors now accorded privileged status seem to
have been granted that distinction on the basis of a formula that, purged of
transcendentalism, instead weighs the archaeological value and formal

characteristics of a given work, asking whether it can stand as a source of

information about nineteenth-century society and/or a worthy model in a
typology of realist narrative. But other factors, including lightly-veiled ideological
concerns, also have their say; and in some instances about equal parts of
received wisdom, serendipity, and critical inertia seem to have determined which
nineteenth-century novels most deserve to be kept or added to the list of works
we study and teach, and which others displaced from center to margin.

Because they are so tightly bound up not just with literary but also with cultural,
social, and even political values, the issues of how and why the canon is
constituted in its present fashion demand much closer scrutiny. The nineteenthcentury novel is repeatedly referred to in manuals of literature as the beginning
of the modern novel in Spain. We readers and critics are likewise citizens of that
extended historical moment or condition known as modernity and its aftermath.
Hence, a deeper understanding of the forces that shape the canon of these
crucial nineteenth-century texts necessarily tells us much about these novels,
and equally as much about our own intellectual prejudices and preoccupations
that are put into play as we set about reading them.
I

Reviewing Dona Perfecta for El Imparcial in 1876, the well-respected Krausist

critic Gonzalez Serrano affirmed without equivocation that "Puede la novela, por
sus especialisimas condiciones, llegar a constituirse en obra de trascendencia
social, politica y aun religiosa, y former el Canon pare toda la vida." With the
exception of the occasional author like Valera, ever the elegant stylist, who chose
to emphasize the ends of the novel as strictly esthetic, most Spanish novelists
and critics of the final third of the nineteenth century specified in their writings
that the novel merited consideration not just as a literary object but also as a
sociological document, ideological manifesto, and highly individualized
expression of national culture. No less so than the editorial columns of
newspapers, the pages of the novel--what this same critic called a "sincretismo
ficticio de esta incoherencia absorbente, que nos rodea por sodas parses"-provided a forum where those representing opposing factions in the contest
between "las dos Espanas" could take account of contemporary reality, newly
perceived in its problematic historical dimensions. As the genre continued to
evolve on its somewhat belated timetable in Spain, this ideological burden that
the novel was made to bear was somewhat lessened. Nonetheless, even an
author and critic as pledged to defend the autonomy of art as Leopoldo Alas was
able to claim that the novel, conceived of in a spirit of "libre examen" and without
ceasing to be an "obra belle, amena," could actually serve physiologists,
philosophers, and psychologists (he mentions Taine and Spencer) as a source of
data and insights into the so-called social question ("Lo prohibido," cited in Beser
243).

Two specific constellations of metaphors, frequently repeated in prologues,

essays, and articles appearing in the periodical press, indicate the weighty role
accorded the novel as preeminent literary genre of the Spanish revolutionary and
Restoration eras. The novel was alternately compared either to a representational
device (photograph, mirror, "cuadro," or even "bodegon"), reflecting a closelyobserved class, region or society, or else to a diagnostic tool (scalpel,
microscope, dissection laboratory), serving to probe the etiology and record the
pathology of social maladies, even if an actual remedy lay beyond the novel's
reach. The novel's function, hence, was perceived as being actively critical; the
means for implementing this objective was the system of literary mimesis
broadly labelled as realism. Working in concert, these two aspects (one ethical,
one esthetic) enthroned the novel as the most powerful of all literary forms,
marking the first of four broad moments in the history of the realist novel in
Spain, and the only one to allow it a transcendental role in both the arbitration of
standards of literary taste and the determination of a potential model for human
action. More than just a convenient label for a class of works within a literary
taxonomy, the novel genre was extolled in typically hyperbolic fashion by Alas as
nothing less than "la manera omnicomprensiva del arte literario" ("Del
naturalismo" cited in Beser 137).

This imperious domination of life and letters by nineteenth-century narrative was

broken with the appearance of a new brand of novel cultivated by Spain's
Generation of 1898: deliberately subjective (Unamuno), anti-rhetorical (Baroja),
plotless and tending to dissolve chronology and characters into a fractured
mosaic of disparate censorial impressions (Azorin). During this second moment in
its history the nineteenth-century novel, anchored as it was in a specifically
bourgeois value system, held little currency among the intellectuals of '98, who
were intent on divorcing themselves from Restoration politics and its cultural
manifestations, and even less currency in the face of ortega y Gasset's esthetics
of deshumanizacion and the various artistic agendas of the vanguard. From the
turn of the century until the outbreak of the civil war, one can point to a
proliferation of novels in which the ventilating of abstract intellectual concerns
from a limited and highly personalized authorial perspective supplanted previous
efforts by novelists to recreate in a concrete, detailed, and ostensibly objective
fashion a microcosm of the totality of society in that segment of it being
depicted. What such diverse novels as Unamuno's Niebla, Miro's El humo
dormido, Perez de Ayala's Belarmino y Apolonio and James' Locura y muerte de
nadie have in common is their studied cultivation of literariness and their no-less
studied disregard for the external referent in pursuit of what Ortega called "el
arte nuevo." They are self-conscious literary exercises that reject such stock-intrade notions of the realist novel as verisimilitude, psychological development of
character, historical consciousness, and organic structural unity, judging such
techniques to be anachronistic and artistically limiting. Intoning that "tienen
caracter y no estilo Lucas o Sorolla, Dickens o Galdos" (30), Ortega had few

qualms in relegating the novel along with other art forms of the preceding
century to the cluttered attic of cultural history. As the surrealist poet Vicente
Aleixandre, by his own admission a fervid reader of Galdos in his adolescence,
was nonetheless forced to recognize, the realist esthetic had become a casualty
of the ludic "new art" proposed by Ortega: "Supongo haber vivido la curve mas
baja del `purgatorio' de Galdos. De 1920 (desde su muerte) a 1935, las nuevas
generaciones literaries se desentendian generalmente del novelista. El realismo
de este y la mesa misma sobre la que operaba estaban muy lejos de las
preocupaciones de la epoca" ("Revision . . ." 3).

The ground lost by the nineteenth-century novel was recovered only in piecemeal
fashion during the post-civil war period, the next significant moment in its life as
a genre. Because the study of literature was instrumentalized and pragmatized
during the Franco dictatorship as part of the ideological apparatus wielded by the
Movimiento, literature and other art forms were valued in postwar Spain insofar
as they could furnish an unequivocal display of Catholic orthodoxy and
patriotism, or be utilized as tools in the inculcation of such values in the masses.
Thus co-opted for official propagandistic purposes, those nineteenth-century
novelists' works remaining when the canon was adjusted to legitimize the regime
were seriously mangled at the hands of the Francoist machine of censorship and
educational control. Writers including Fernan Caballero, Pereda, Alarcon, Coloma,
and, with certain reservations, Palacio Valdes and Valera, officially sanctioned by
the Cuestionario de lengua y literatura appearing in the Orden del 14-iv-1939 of
the Ministry of Education and endorsed in such journals as Atenas and Razon y
Fe, were indeed recommended study towards completion of the bachillerato, but
for reasons extraneous to their relative merits as novelists. Rather, these authors
were praised for their doctrinaire conservatism in political, theological, and moral
matters. When the contemporary novelist Juan Goytisolo writes of matriculating
at the University of Barcelona in 1948 "despues de un bachillerato en el que la
unica obra literaria que se nos dio a leer fue Pequeneces del padre Coloma"
(155), he is describing an instructional experience not atypical of that of many
Spaniards channeled through the largely Church-controlled educational system
during the 1940s and 50s, when lesser works that conformed to prevailing
notions of lo castizo found their way onto approved reading lists. In this instance,
the work in contention was a late nineteenth-century serial novel, written by a
Jesuit, in which the story of a decadent aristocracy's desertion of its social
mission is played out as a drama of sin, loss, and redemption. That such a work
was more vigorously promoted over other realist fictions which were perhaps less
programmatic (or less ideologically congenial to the political right) in their
representation of Spanish society's values is indication enough of the type of
norms being invoked by Francoist literary hagiolaters.

The fortunes of other significant nineteenth-century writers aligned on the wrong

side of the ideological fence were considerably less felicitous during the Franco
years. Valera was considered a sceptic who failed to understand true Christian

mysticism; Pardo Bazan's novels were damned as crudely naturalistic; many of

Blasco Ibanez' works of the tenor of La arana negra were prohibited from being
reedited on grounds of their irreligiosity. While the Episodios Nacionales passed
muster as suitably patriotic texts and Marianela was dismissed as a harmless
sentimental interlude, virtually all of Galdos' social novels were condemned for
the sins of anticlericalism and liberalism--"esas toxinas," as Luis Araujo Costa
identified them in his 1957 edition of Trafalgar, which imperilled Galdos' standing
as a nineteenth-century paladin of espanolismo (cited in Valls 161). As one
manual of Spanish literature explained, Galdos presented the unfortunate case of
an "autor de gran merito literario, pero de caracter moral reprobable o de
tendencies ideological o religiosas erroneas" (cited by Valls 161). The centenary
celebration of Galdos' birth in 1943 which, fueled by the impetus of Spanish
critics in exile achieved considerable momentum in Latin America, was, with few
exceptions, suppressed on the Iberian peninsula (Abellan 41, 49-50; Valls 160-3;
Percival 34-6). By contrast, Clarin was not so much refuted as ignored.
Descriptions in manuals of literary history of his contributions to the novel were
either edited drastically or else expunged altogether. The apparent conspiracy of
silence greeting the publication of La Regenta in 1884-5 (see Tintore) was
outdone by the postwar policy that, in banishing the Oviedan novelist from the
roster of the literary establishment or emphasizing only such potentially negative
features as his novel's great length and abundance of description, deflected the
attention of Spanish readers away from one of the most important practitioners
of nineteenth-century fiction.

It should be stressed that the deep fissures that make of Spanish culture and its
evaluation such a contentious affair were already visible during the latter portion
of the Enlightenment and firmly in place by the time of the Cortes de Cadiz in
1812. In other words, attempts to recruit the nineteenth-century novel in support
of one or another ideology, irrespective of formal and literary concerns, are
scarcely unique to the post-1939 era. overtly biased readings were already a
feature of the criticism that prevailed when the novel dominated the literary
scene during the previous century. At their best, such readings attempted to
place Spanish literature within a unified, and unifying, cultural context, as
exemplified by Menendez Pelayo's situation of Spanish masterpieces within an
uninterrupted continuum of Catholicism, national tradition, and latinidad. At their
worst, they turned criticism into an outlet for self-righteous moral
pronouncements of the tenor of Father Blanco Garcia's vituperative La literatura
espanola en el siglo XIX Ironically, the very same Pequeneces to which Goytisolo
had been subjected in the 1940s, presumably for its edifying moral tableaux, was
itself at the time of its publication in 1891 at the center of the algarada, an
obstreperous critical free-for-all played out in the press and the pulpit between
progressives and reactionaries along strictly partisan lines, in blatant disregard
for the successes or failures of the book as narrative per se. Coloma's tract, or
the religious thesis novels of Galdos and Pereda, are among the many works
submitted to a criticism which so often substituted moralization for stylistics or
poetics. only half in jest did Pardo Bazan write in La cuestion palpitante that in

the minds of many Spaniards the blame for the decline in national standards of
morality, previously reserved for the lottery and the bullfight, now deserved to be
ascribed to the ascendancy of a lowminded, pornographic naturalism in literature
(31). Set in this context, the application of an ideological litmus test in lieu of
axiological criteria based on notions of taste or esthetic form to determine a
novel's eligibility for canonical status can be seen to belong to a well-bearded
tradition that antedates the Franco project by almost a century.[1]

As a case of attempted blanket institutional control of interpretation, however,

the postwar shaping of the novelistic canon under the direction of Gabriel AriasSalgado in the Ministerio de Informacion y Turismo is particularly instructive as to
how glaringly blind the institution could often be to challenges to its hegemony.
The Episodios, for example, were never proscribed as unfit reading for Spaniards,
despite the fact that from one series to the next Galdos becomes increasingly
pessimistic regarding the nonprogressive course of Spain's history, more vocal in
his condemnation of factionalism, quixotic idealism, political abstraction, religious
intolerance, and the empty pursuit of military glory as holdovers from a feudal
past. It has been amply demonstrated that the Franco regime never managed to
create a coherent ideology of its own, much less a Francoist intellectual culture,
and that its policies governing editorial censorship were more often than not
perceived as arbitrary and contradictory (Abellan 87-96). on the basis of the
anomalous configuration of a novelistic canon which simultaneously interrogated
and found wanting the non-political Valera yet included the unflinchingly critical
Galdosian examination of national conscience and motives in the Episodios, one
is forced to conclude that the architects and servants of Spanish postwar editorial
and educational policy were not only muzzy ideologues but bad readers as well.
At the very least, they must have been lazy ones who never read beyond the
more heroically-conceived novels of the first series (there were five in all),
content to parrot Menendez Pelayo's judgment that the Episodios "hen educado a
la juventud en el culto de la patria" (68). Through all of this, the notion of
mimesis itself was rarely attacked; in fact, rehabilitated from the disrepute into
which it had fallen during the heyday of the vanguard, realism was lauded as a
perennial and transgeneric impulse of Spanish literature, virtually an expression
of national character, recurring in the epic of the Cid, Rojas' Celestina, the
picaresque novel, Cervantes, and many other texts leading up to its full flowering
in the nineteenth-century novel. It was instead the chosen object of a realist
novel's gaze or the expression of a negative judgment on traditional Spanish
society compared to European norms that earned certain realist writers the
displeasure of the regime's censors.
II

Since the 1960s, simultaneous with the transformation of Spain's economic and
social infrastructure, realist fiction has once again become the object of
increasing critical attention. The resurgence of interest in nineteenth-century

Spanish fiction occurred providentially at a time when the rise of studies in the
fields of narratology and semiotics championed by Genette, Barthes, Todorov,
Bal, Greimas, Prince, and others had shifted attention primarily to the genre of
prose narratives. While the chronology is probably coincidental, given the relative
slowness with which Hispanism has responded to more innovative strains of
continental criticism, it is evident that it is the application of contemporary
literary theory that has wielded greatest impact, affecting somewhat Hispanists'
current constitution of the canon and to an even greater degree the manner in
which these privileged texts are being read and exploited in conformity with
postrealist expectations of the novel. As renewed interest in Galdos, Pardo Bazan,
and Alas has grown, so has also a general awareness of most recent theoretical
approaches to literature as either text-centered (structuralism, poststructuralism,
and deconstruction) or text-and-reader interactive (reader-response criticism and
reception theory).

What this means is that without altogether abandoning the notion of the
nineteenth-century novel as a Stendhalian "miroir qui se promene sur une grande
route," readers are now beginning to admit that the much-touted relationship
between literature and social reality exhibited in realist fiction is a non-exclusive
one; that, on the contrary, inter- and intratextual relationships are of paramount
importance and are certainly no less intense for their being non-representational.
Consequently, Hispanists dissatisfied with simple glosses of the plot or the
numbingly mechanical recounting of sources, historical particulars, and
biographical tidbits fostered by a fossilized tradition of positivist scholarship no
longer see as their principal task the manipulation of the novel as just one more
document pertaining to the archaeology of nineteenth-century society.

Expositions of an author's political and philosophical agenda (e. g., Pereda's

antirevolutionary politics in Pedro Sanchez; krausismo in Leon Roch) and
sociohistorical reconstructions (Gallegan social oligarchies portrayed in Pardo
Bazan's Marineda; the phenomenon of modern urbanization in Galdos' Madrid)
have, of course, their uses and applications. Yet while they shed light on
significant preconditions of the text's creation and thereby offer needed
clarification to the present-day reader, they scarcely qualify as interpretative
analyses or evaluations of literary discourse per se. Instead, or at least initially,
purveyors of the new critical idiom are directing their attention to the works
themselves, to their structural properties and the ways that their relational
arrangement into patterns can create meaning(s). They pose the question not so
much of what the text means (for this may be variable and plural) as how it
means, a question which can only be answered by considering the novel as
dynamic process rather than static product--"literature as system," as Claudio
Guillen would have it (12-13). Rutherford's programmatic statement in the
Introduction to his guide to La Regenta is illustrative:

I shall concentrate on the text itself, leaving aside questions of its external
relationships (with the society of its time, with the national literary traditions to
which it belongs, with its literary, philosophical and ideological sources, with the
life, intentions and other works of its author) . . . My approach will, therefore, be
analytical and non-historical; I shall try to indicate how La. Regenta, as an
organized system, communicates its meanings to its readers, who, to read and
understand it, do not need to be aware of the particular causes or circumstances
of its writing. (9)

This is certainly not to imply that contextual readings of Spanish realist fiction
have been banished by purely textual readings, or by the hollowly formalist ones
into which they may degenerate. Actually, the former continue to abound,
especially in the feminist perspectives brought to bear in the work of CharnonDeutsch, Blanco, and Aldaraca and the Marxist-oriented inquiries of Goldman,
Sinnigen, Blanco Aguinaga, Rodriguez Puertolas, and Fuentes. Yet even those who
approach the production of the Spanish realists from a more traditionally
historicist perspective attuned to issues of gender and/or class, alert to the fact
that the nineteenth-century novel is almost never an internally consistent
ideological vehicle, often point to dislocations, slippages, and contradictions at
precisely the level of structure and language as proof of the ways in which the
ruling ideologies of texts, their authors, and society at large may be involved in a
high-stakes game of concealment and self-betrayal.

The tendency to contextualize, to pledge one's allegiance to a historically-specific

narrative in recounting the genesis and development of realist fiction, also seems
rather more acute in Spanish critics as opposed to those Hispanists (Spaniards
included) trained and/or working currently in the Anglo-American university
system. Lacking an autochthonous reservoir of critical approaches to narrative
poetics upon which to draw, and, until recently, not fully receptive to imported
theories that diverged from the canonized exegetical methods of the ruling
critical elite in early postwar Spain (Menendez Pidal, Damaso Alonso, Carlos
Bousono, Amado Alonso, Joaquin Casalduero, et al.), literary scholarship in Spain
often continues to approach the study of the nineteenth-century novel relying
upon "un historicismo renovado en que se conjugan las circunstancias epocales y
lo biografico con las observaciones estilisticas" (Gullon, G., La novela 36).[2] one
can sympathize with the discomfort provoked by the specter of relativism as
raised by contemporary criticism and which the reliance upon traditional
historicism is designed to assuage. Nonetheless, the insistence upon viewing a
realist novel as a closed, serf-contained `work' in contradistinction to the
Barthesian open, plural `text' has the potential to impoverish substantially the
critical dialogue rather than expand its parameters.

Consider, for instance, the following assertion made by Francisco Caudet in the
Introduction to his edition of Fortunata y Jacinta: "La relacion dialectica del
escritor con el referente socio-historico, que el artiste realista ha convertido
deliberadamente en materia prima de su obra, trace que defender el texto
realista como algo gratuito, plenamente autonomo, sea una quimera
tergiversadora" (12). While-such a statement appears at first glance to expound a
perfectly commonsensical vision of the realist novel generated as an imaginative
response to circumstances in the writer's milieu, it invokes some very serious
corollaries. Caudet's and other like declarations in effect posit three tasks
incumbent on the critic: to accept that there exists a single master trope or
interpretation that holds the key to the novel's meaning (in this case, an
unvarying one-to-one relationship between the novel and the real world); to
assume that, given a sufficient quantity of historical information, this meaning
can be laid bare; and to agree to eventual professional retraining, since the
achievement of the arch-exegesis must logically arrest both the need for future
commentary and one's further services as critic.

Nonetheless, the awareness that the movement of reading and interpretation

must be centrifugal rather than centripetal, departing from the foregrounded text
in itself and only later annexing the broader range of critical preoccupations
(historical, social or ethical) that characterize the sphere of the extratextual,
informs some of the best criticism being written today on the nineteenth century.
As one possible example, most previous studies of Galdos' Miau, to quote
Eamonn Rodgers, have relied on perspectives "much more appropriate to moral
choices in real life than to the elucidation of literary texts" (cited by Valis 415).
The story of an unemployed bureaucrat's unrelenting solitude both in the
workplace and at home among his family has elicited abundant commentary over
the years on the possible meaning of his eventual suicide. As a result of the
sociothematic nature of this emphasis, however, replete with discussions of the
phenomena of empleomania and cesantia as provoked by Spain's turbulent
politics, the examination of the novel as an operative system of literary discourse
is relegated to the critical periphery. By redefining the "moral pressure" that
inhabits this novel as really "the need for meaning" in the face of verbal dialectics
that can assure no certainty regarding reality, Noel Valis attempts a reversal of
this priority of content over form and context over text. In putting aside such nonliterary debates as whether or not Ramon Villaamil is meted out justice by his
society, Valis can instead refocus the discussion on the protagonist's frustrated
search for absolute and determinate meaning and the novel's own manner of
straddling the line between sense and nonsense, "the border between meaning
and non-meaning, in the uncertain and fragile zone of Miau" (427), never losing
sight of the fact that the text's existence as a specifically literary artifact must
command primacy over our attention.

These, then, could be considered the current slogans: the return to the text, the
discovery of textuality. But which precisely are the texts being read? Curiously, if

we discount Francoist readings of nineteenth-century fiction as a lamentable

literary-historical parenthesis that has now been closed off, the current canon-understood as encompassing those books which consistently turn up as the
subject of college course syllabi, symposia, articles, and reviews in scholarly
journals--looks remarkably similar to the canon proposed at the turn of the
century.

Presumably, canons may be modified in one of two basic ways, either through the
wholesale inclusion or exclusion of particular writers, or through adjustment and
finetuning of the list of canonized titles (some previously sanctioned works
demoted, others newly-valued or revalued and duly added) by writers whose
place in the literary establishment remains secure. Isolated examples of both
have indeed modified the shape of the Spanish novel canon. The one truly
meteoric revision that has occurred in the last two decades is the unqualified
admission of Clarin to the pantheon of great Spanish realists on the basis of his
two novels and several volumes of short fiction. (This stands in direct contrast to
earlier evaluations, v. gr., Menendez Pelayo's, that accorded singular weight only
to Alas' critical and philosophical thought). It is also true that certain previously
staple works are generating proportionately less interest while others have
become more fashionable objects of inquiry. Studies of naturalism in Los pazos de
Ulloa, for example, have given way to explorations of decadentism, esthetic
consciousness, and the voice of the feminine, especially in Pardo Bazan's later
novels (La quimera, La sirena negra), while the Episodios nacionales are no
longer dismissed as simply hack writing in the tradition of the serial novel.
Similarly, some of the Galdosian Novelas contemporaneas traditionally held in
lesser esteem (El doctor Centeno, La incognita, Realidad) are now being more
judiciously scrutinized to determine if they are indeed lesser works, or, instead,
texts that may have violated principles of unity or closure typically associated
with realist novels and so disappointed the expectations of earlier critics. on the
whole, though, more or less the same evaluative hierarchy continues to obtain.
We still read Fortunata y Jacinta (or now, alternately, La Regenta) as the
maximum representative of nineteenth-century narrative; we still prefer La de
Bringas or La desheredada to Dona Perfecta or Gloria, the Novelas
contemporaneas to the Episodios, Galdos and Clarin over Pereda, Pardo Bazan,
and Valera, and all of these over Alarcon, Palacio Valdes, Coloma, Picon, Oller,
Ortega Munilla, and so forth. In fact, the relative (in)frequency with which the
present study refers to certain authors and titles reflects my own tacit recognition
of a prevailing pecking order.

In the face of this relative stability of the canon, what indeed has changed
dramatically is the position of realist fiction vis-a-vis later developments in the
novel. If these works no longer provide the canon or model for life, neither do
they provide the canon for the novel, although they continue to be taught and
studied for their historical importance as Ur-forms of the genre, now superseded.
Put another way, "the nineteenth [century] is not the fashionable favorite among

younger Hispanists these days. only Galdos and Clarin are the exceptions, and
they have attracted veritable cults. For the rest, when there is a choice between
Gil y Zarate and gorges, the choice is clear" (Kronik 3). The reason for that choice
seems equally clear, and appears to rest on the inevitability of our reading
through the screen of literary modernity, with its attendant rejection of the claims
staked out by the realist novel as both naive and deceptive, unrealizable and
undesirable.

Whether or not one accepts as conclusive recent reports regarding the death of
realism, no discussion of the current position of the nineteenth-century novel is
complete without taking into account the degraded status of realism in
contemporary theoretical debates. Earlier definitions dwelt amid the realms of
the formalist (realism as encompassing a specific series of techniques:
omniscience and impartiality; identifiable formal patterning; fidelity to social,
historical, psychological, and linguistic detail) or the ontological (realism as a
means of conveying knowledge regarding human experience of a predominantly
social and historical nature through its intricate depiction of man-in-the-world).
Grounding both these definitions was the assumption of an imperturbable
correspondence between the lived world and its linguistic simulacrum in the
novel, a correspondence which has been shrugged off in the post-Saussurean
universe of signifiers irremediably sundered from signifieds and meanings
generated by difference (that is to say, deferral or absence) rather than
presence. More recent forays into the subject have accordingly redefined realism
as a kind of rhetorical ploy whose intended function is notably pragmatic; and
this function, seen as authoritarian and paternalistic, has engendered objections
on esthetic, ideological, and philosophical grounds. In what amounts to a major
turnaround, realism is no longer recognized as a baring of previously hidden or
ignored social realities but instead as a stratagem that prolongs their occultation
and hence must be demystified and unmasked.

Barthes pinpointed that element of the realist endeavor most vulnerable to

attack when he charged that realism as a literary mode attempts to naturalize
and make transparent something which is in fact arbitrary and conventional,
imposed upon the community of readers, writers, and critics by its own members
rather than stemming from nature itself:

the realist mode of writing, is a combination of the formal signs of Literature

(preterite, indirect speech, the rhythm of written language) and of the no less
formal signs of realism (incongruous snippets of popular speech, strong language
or dialect words, etc.), so that no mode of writing was more artificial than that
which set out to give the most accurate description of Nature . . . The writing of
Realism is far from being neutral, it is on the contrary loaded with the most
spectacular signs of fabrication. (67)

Others have, like Kermode, chided the nostalgia for a "secretarial realism" that
propounds "an anachronistic myth of common understanding and shared
universes of meaning" ("Novels . . ." 112). Even assuming that such a
correspondence theory of realism based on consensually-established values were
acceptable, the very notion of a "secretarial" esthetic would limit an artist's
creativity by implying that the best a writer can aspire to is the office of copyist,
like Flaubert's inane pair Bouvard and Pecuchet or Alas' pathetic Bonifacio Reyes.
As an esthetic that endeavors to transcribe objective reality with a minimum of
stylistic interference, realism "exalts Life and diminishes Art, exalts things and
diminishes words" (Scholes 11)--in effect, an art of the anti-artful that would
become indistinguishable from documentary (as indeed was naturalism's goal)
and ultimately would write itself out of existence as literature. Respect for the
laws of realistic probability shrinks the scope available to the artist's imagination;
and, concomitantly, studies of realist fiction generally pay greatest attention to
the aspects of dispositio and elocutio while routinely ignoring that of inventio
(Gullon, G., "Problemas . . ." 186). But as a corollary to linguists' and
philosophers' rejection of the correspondence theory, the project of realist art
holding a mirror up to nature also becomes illusory, a fiction in itself. Such a
project is yet another manifestation of the ocular/specular metaphor that has
been foundational to Western culture ever since the advent of the mind-body
problem in philosophy (Rorty 273-95; 333-42). The praxis of realism, in which the
implied author ostensibly engages with an objective reality that is separate and
independent from the observer, in fact presupposes a metaphysics of dualism.
This sharply defined subject/object dichotomy, however, is invalidated by the fact
that reality can never be known or communicated independently of language, a
system inhering in the individual as observing self: "one cannot use a part of
one's present theory to underwrite the rest of it" (Rorty 294). The post-Kantian
writing or speaking subject is therefore inevitably confined to an esthetic of
subjectivity.

The unmasking of the conventions and rhetoric of realism is equally central to

Marxist considerations of the problem. As dictated by the logic of the Marxist
position, the framing of realist discourse is no mere benign drudgery, no
formulaic schoolboy exercise in transcription carried out by an uninspired lot of
writers. Rather, it indulges a willful exercise of power that comes to be obscured
as such by the very familiarity of the techniques that are employed and the dayto-day reality that is thematized. Eagleton admonishes those critics (Lukacs
included) who, like the nineteenth-century realists they exalt, are responsible for
"having made a fetish of one historically relative literary form" (71), and this
gravamen is reiterated no less forcefully by Jameson:

This is the situation in which the great realistic novelists, `shepherds of Being' of
a very special ideological type, are forced, by their own narrative and aesthetic

vested interests, into a repudiation of revolutionary change and an ultimate stake

in the status quo. Their evocation of the solidity of their object of representation-the social world grasped as an organic, natural, Burkean permanence--is
necessarily threatened by any suggestion that that world is not natural, but
historical, and subject to radical change. (193)

In brief, realist writers dupe themselves and their readers. on balance, the
conclusion seems to be that since literary realism represents an esthetic and
ideological cul-de-sac, the faster novelists freed themselves from its strictures the
better.

The upshot has been that, as regards the exegetical activities of Hispanists
working in the field of nineteenth-century studies, the academy has seen the
balance of pressure shift from canonical to hermeneutical restrictions, as
Kermode distinguishes between them ("Institutional Control . . ." 74). That is to
say, since the actual canon has not been substantially altered even as realism's
aims have been disallowed as ingenuous, erroneous, or repressive, these same
works must now be read according to sharply differing criteria if critics are to
preserve the text's viability as something that continues to speak to the late
twentieth-century reader. Accordingly, under the influence of structuralist and
deconstructive strategies, these novels are being probed to expose disturbing
marginal excrescences, unwitting inversions in the declared logic of the text, selfreflexive properties of the narrative and its language, and metafictional devices
that undermine the epistemological certainty that realism sought to project. In
short, much of nineteenth-century fiction is being considered, proleptically, in the
context of early twentieth-century texts and the latter's rupture with previously
sanctified forms and themes of the novel, with highest praise (i.e., greatest
number of articles, papers, and dissertations) going to those novels which seem
to exceed or diverge from traditional norms and forms of the novel and presage
the advent of literary modernity. This is scarcely a phenomenon unique to the
critical community of Hispanism. Looking within the ranks of French authors,
Walter Benjamin and Jonathan Culler respectively single out Baudelaire and
Flaubert as writers incarnating the contradiction between traditional modes of art
and the radical break which modernism represented. In Spanish literature Clarin
and Galdos are the authors who, while writing well within the parameters of
nineteenth-century bourgeois fiction, are most frequently cited as harbingers of
the course of the novel in the following century.

The change of critical venue is most readily apparent in recent readings of La

Regenta and the Episodios. The former, previously valued as a faithful recreation
of finisecular provincial society descended from costumbrismo and naturalism, is
now described as a novel turned in upon itself in meditation upon its own
creation as narrative: what Alarcos Llorach, looking at the circularity of its

structure, called an "obra [que] se muerde la cola" (243). Recent studies have
focussed on such features of the text as entropy, spatiality, indeterminacy, the
presence of ecriture, and the degradation of language and culture as seen in the
proliferation of self-doubting "signos, formas letradas y librescas" in Clarin's
massive work (Turner 380). In one suggestive reading of Alas' tale of Vetustan
adultery, hypocrisy, and disillusionment, the slow and sometimes halting
progress of the novel is explained by the narrator's obsessive need to go back
over nearly every episode of the plot he narrates, with less concern for the story
itself than for the manner of its verbal presentation as text. Sentences,
paragraphs, and entire sequences are in effect placed sous rature and
subsequently reedited or rewritten. In this hypertrophic reflexivity of the novel's
discourse, Clarin is seen as a "companero de viaje de los modernistas" (Gullon,
G., La novela 133). A similar critical telos may also be discerned, albeit as a
minority voice, in the ongoing dialogue surrounding the Galdosian Episodios
nacionales. The latter, usually considered a vast explanatory frieze of national
history, is in the work of certain present critics taken as proof of just the opposite:
the impossibility of all historiography's claims to truth, knowledge, and absolute
origins, its indistinguishability from fiction (Urey). Those same seismic tremors
that have been detected in Clarin's work--"The ground is trembling beneath the
realistic foundations of La Regenta" (Rivkin 321)--can in fact be felt rumbling
through many a Spanish novel after 1881.

On the one hand, these new readings have had the salutary effect of forcing a
reevaluation of the concept of literary realism. Realism can no longer be seen as
a transparent and uncomplicated reproduction of the referent and instead must
be redefined as a considerably more opaque strategy that harbors the seeds of
its own impending negation, examples of which can be found in numerous
nineteenth-century texts that purportedly signify the external world yet only end
up signifying themselves as literary entities. This, after all, is the irony that
reverberates in Maximo Manso's opening words to the novel he narrates: "Yo no
existo . . . juro y perjuro que no existo." Moreover, the questioning of realism
reflects a more general dissatisfaction with the inadequacies of nomenclature
and periodization as they apply to certain exceptional or transitional novels (La
Regenta among them) that overflow the boundaries and categories allotted to
them.

On the other hand, by virtue of reading back to the future, the inadvertent winner
(the deliberately designated winner, as Gerald Graff glumly maintains in his
analysis of the politics of anti-realism) is still not nineteenth-century narrative,
but rather the narrative of modernity and even postmodernism extending from
Azorin, Valle-Inclan, Gomez de la Serna and Miro to Goytisolo, Benet, and Torrente
Ballester. In El misterio de la cripta embrujada, Eduardo Mendoza's spoof of
detective fiction that doubles as a squint-eyed critique of Spain during the
transition to democracy, the narrator defines the raison d'etre of the entire period
1939-1975 with the epithet "la era prepostfranquista" (20); it is tempting to

relabel analogously the nineteenth-century novel as the epoch of

"pre(post)modernismo." An example of the Derridean claim that texts are neither
original nor originary but instead always already caught in a chain of continually
proliferating signifiers, part of an intertextual weave that nullifies historicization?
or, to the contrary, an example of a radical disfigurement of history that in
fostering a rapprochement between realist texts and modernist ones ignores the
distance that the writers themselves of the period 1898-1936 consciously sought
to establish and reductively locates realism's value in its precocious rehearsal of
modernism?

As must be readily apparent, along with so many other aspects of contemporary

theory that have become part of their working vocabulary, Hispanists have also
absorbed some of the unresolved contradictions generated by the individual
critical positions they hold or by their combined usage under the umbrella of a
new critical pluralism. Two such inconsistencies surface repeatedly in recent
treatments of nineteenth-century Spanish fiction.

For one, despite the repudiation of a criticism as practiced either during the
Bourbon Restoration or subsequently by the Franco regime, according to which a
literary work was judged on the basis of its promotion of political allegiances or
exemplary Christian conduct, it is difficult to see how such a perspective differs
substantially from the moral spin that has been put on the current binary
opposition of realism vs. modernism. In the hierarchical relationship integrated by
these two concepts, modernism has become the privileged term, realism the
derelict one, characterized in a language of strong moral connotation as
deceptive, imitative, or oppressive. Criticism of the novel in late eighteenth--and
early nineteenth-century Spain was effectively born under the sign of a moral
imperative; reading of secular literature, including the ever-suspect novel, was
permissible insofar as it instilled love of virtue and country and obedience to God
and church. Almost two centuries later, and proceeding from the opposite end of
the political spectrum, criticism still finds itself enmeshed in ideologico-moral
judgments.

In another troublesome vein, the attempt to jettison historical ballast from the
exegetical process has met with only partial success. Those critics who read back
to the future, claiming to be unfettered by a potentially distorting vision of the
diachronic organization of literature, are themselves trafficking in a notion
circumscribed by a clearly historical premise: that of progressivism and evolution,
the old nineteenth-century notion that institutions are evolving towards an
ultimate perfectibility of form. Here that premise is expressed in the idea that
realism ultimately culminates in the more excellent novel that represents the
triumph of modernism.

Equally complex is the problem of how to explain the relative constancy of

Hispanism's nineteenth-century great books list, when, given the current critical
climate, there has been perhaps every encouragement to question the validity of
canons in general. Despite noteworthy critical and philosophical efforts, it has
proved virtually impossible to establish a more resolute definition of literature
than the following: particular writings that are highly valued by certain members
of a society. Logically, the exclusivity postulated by a canon suffers when it is
admitted that there are no intrinsically distinctive features that mark literature, or
that Valera's limpid novelistic discourse may be subjected to the same kinds of
analysis as a billboard ad for Tio Pepe sherry.

Secondly, and by definition, any discussion of the concept of canon necessarily

entails the delimitation of a certain class of privileged works that have received
the imprimatur of the academy, to the exclusion of entire sets of competing or
complementary texts. Canon vs. non-canon implies a breach between
mainstream and margin, high and low culture, one group of esthetic responses
deemed acceptable and even ennobling and another group deemed
impoverished or threatening. Because, however, of the nature of the
presuppositions upon which such distinctions are made, the notion of literary
canon is often no less suspect than that of realism, with which it shares many
features. one of the axioms regarding the nature of the realist novel is its
undisputed representative value of the society and types it depicts. Moreover,
while it provides a lasting record of the society it chronicles, the very necessity of
the act of such recording testifies to the immense mutability of social forms,
always poised--especially so in the nineteenth century-- on the brink of change.
Similarly, a literary canon is assumed to be representative (in this case, of a
range of literary forms and innovations, and of received human values reflected
in them), and also exemplifies the dialectic of permanence and (r)evolution.
Canons, paradoxically, lead to the preservation of order by offering models of
tradition to emulate, but at the same time, owing to the evolutionary nature of
art, style, and genre, they function as a record of the production of cultural
change. More pointedly, even staunch defenders who eloquently argue for the
humanist concept of the canon as "the fantasy of a best self to be excavated
from the past" and see the canon as a source of both models of craft and human
wisdom must admit that, like realism, "canons are not natural facts" but rather
institutional constructs which can as easily conceal exercises of power and the
"pursuit of self-representations that satisfy narcissistic demands" as embody
norms of taste and conduct (Altieri 43). Like the vision of society displayed by the
novels of realism, the values and standards promoted by canons are presented as
immutable yet are often highly contingent.

Finally, the theoretical division between canon and non-canon was already
effected and then undermined in practice by nineteenth-century authors. The
latter distinguished between serious novels (which qualified as great art) and
folletines and penny dreadfuls (which did not), yet it is clear that in Spain there

was a good deal of crossover from the universally-lambasted serial novel to the
so-called high novel. Extensive work done on the structure and sociology of the
folletin and the reception of popular literature by Ferreras, Romero Tobar, Botrel,
Marcos, Amoros, Yndurain, and Andreu has helped clarify the numerous instances
in which the forms, themes, and techniques of non-canonical literature were
profitably incorporated into the novels of Galdos and his contemporaries as a way
to attract a larger readership while also examining and even subtly parodying the
conventions that structure the novel. At the same time, a modest increase in the
number of modern annotated editions of nineteenth-century works brought out
by publishing houses such as Catedra, Castalia, and the various regional presses
has again made available certain of these minor novels (for instance, Coloma's
Pequeneces, Picon's Dulce y sabrosa, Ortega Munilla's Cleopatra Perez) as well as
magnified the visibility of oft-neglected novels by more prominent authors
(Valera's Dona Luz and Genio y figura, Pereda's La puchera, Pardo Bazan's La
tribuna, etc.).

Some critics have advocated enlarging the canon with folletines and other
similarly marginal texts, although they then face the nagging question of how to
reconcile the image of the nineteenth-century novel as popularly-influenced with
the competing image of this same novel as an anticipation of modernist, that is,
elitist or minoritarian art forms. others have decried the refusal to grant equal
and serious consideration to Spanish women novelists, whose toehold on claims
to literary excellence and canonicity has traditionally been far more precarious.
Most Hispanists, however, pay scant lip service to the writings of Picon, Alarcon,
Fernan Caballero, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, and many others, regardless
of their increased accessibility, leaving unchallenged the canon as inherited from
previous generations of readers and literary historians. This unchanging
reproduction of the canon, we have seen, can scarcely pretend to be based upon
a commonality of esthetic value judgments among critics of the past several
decades. Instead, the repeated omission or inclusion in the canon of any
particular novel by Galdos, Pardo Bazan, or their contemporaries must be
understood as arising from a tangled confluence of discrete circumstances, "the
product neither of the objectively (in the Marxist sense) conspiratorial force of
establishment institutions nor of the continuous appreciation of the timeless
virtues of a fixed object by succeeding generations of isolated readers, but,
rather, of a series of continuous interactions among a variably constituted object,
emergent conditions, and mechanisms of cultural selection and transmission"
(Smith 26). In the continuing exploration of the intricate cultural dynamics
governing the status of any given work relative to the nineteenth-century canon,
we find a prime example of the textual as it comes back full circle to the
contextual.
III

These constitute only a few of the paradoxes surrounding current evaluations of

the Spanish nineteenth-century novel. In an ironic twist, readers are now being
told by the media in certain quarters that they are tired of postmodernism,
experimental prose and film, what is on occasion referred to as the "literature of
exhaustion" (Stark). And so Ricardo Gullon, writing on Cien anos de soledad,
comments that la "diferencia entre el [Garcia Marquez] y algunos novelistas
contemporaneos estriba en que estos se pierden en el laberinto de las tecnicas, y
el no" (44). In comparing Macondo to the Compson's Yoknapatawpha, Goriot's
Paris, or Fortunata's Madrid, he calls them all "invenciones reservadas a quienes,
como Garcia Marquez, aciertan a resucitar el viejisimo y casi olvidado arte de
contar y lo practican con la complicada sencillez que este arte exige," offering a
noble defense of the nineteenth-century novel as archetypal example of this
class of fiction.

In fact, the nineteenth-century novel is not infrequently identified by the

distinctly positive connotations attendant upon the tag of "classical" form of
narrative. Classical realist novels embody those features of storytelling that
encourage the public to read for the plot, to identify with the characters and
situations portrayed, to seek out in the written word the imaginative expression
of their own private desires; they provide the guilty pleasures of the good read
furtively enjoyed by Aleixandre and Lorca as they discovered their mutual and
unabashed enthusiasm for the then-unfashionable Galdos: "nos descubrimos
ambos admiradores apasionados de Galdos fen aquella epoca! y amigos `vividos'
y sin falla, desde chicos, de Jacinta, de la Peri, de Orozco, del Leon de Albrit"
("Revision . . ." 3). Nonetheless, in another indication of the postmodern bias
within which they move, critics heap their plaudits on twentieth-century authors
who manage to rework, transform, or otherwise reinvent the underpinnings of the
realist novel, yet simultaneously denigrate the original nineteenth-century model
by which these successive adaptations are judged. And so Garcia Marquez is
congratulated for his revival of storytelling "in an almost classical mode," to
borrow Harold Brodkey's title phrase, while the traditional and originary
narratives of Alarcon go unread: "Quienes afirman que Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
es el mejor narrador del siglo xix superan en numero a los asiduos
frecuentadores de sus textos" (Gullon, G., La novela 35). There is little cause for
surprise here. Did not Borges already apprise us that Pierre Menard's
achievement in writing the Quigote surpassed that of Cervantes'?

Yet even as this latest version of the myth of the golden age nourishes the drive
to return to an earlier, more communal sort of narrative, others deride those
twentieth-century heirs of realism who "continue to write frantically, headless
chickens unaware of the decapitating axe" (Scholes 21). Nostalgia for the great
age of classical realist narrative notwithstanding, neither writers, readers, nor
critics can go home again and duplicate under identical conditions the
nineteenth-century experience of composing and encountering realist novels.
Both the acts of writing and reading are irreversible. Fixed in time and place, they

are rarely (if ever) performed in a climate of cultural neutrality; so to impugn

readers who don the lenses of (post)modernity when interpreting the text placed
before them is a largely ineffectual gesture. But further inquiry directed to
specific nineteenth-century Hispanic texts, canonical or not, can contribute to
refining and revising the master narrative constructed to date on what Andreas
Huyssen has dubbed "the great divide" separating the age of realism from the
age of modernity and beyond. of course, in perusing these recent accounts of
theirs of the Spanish nineteenth-century novel Hispanists can, if they choose,
read their own critical autobiography as well.

[1] In this study I generally oppose literary to nonliterary or extraliterary criteria

in the process of canon formation and consolidation I am well aware that one
may plausibly argue that no act of literary evaluation is totally free of selfinterested perceptual biases, and that for some the distinction between an ideal
critic whose cognitive appreciation of esthetic form would result in objective and
universal value judgments and a practical critic whose dicta are influenced by the
political and social relationship she bears to the reading audience is in feet a
straw-man opposition, particularly since the ideal critic is a construct that exists
solely on paper. Paralleling the tendency in contemporary criticism (especially
marked in Derrida and Foucault) that sees embedded in literary structures an
articulation of modes and relations of power, Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues
that "The recurrent impulse or effort to define aesthetic value by
contradistinction to all forms of utility or as the negation of all other nameable
sources of interest or forms of value--hedonic, practical, sentimental, ornamental,
historical, ideological, and so forth--is, in effcet, to define it out of existence; for
when all such particular utilities, interests, and sources of value have been
subtracted, nothing remains" (14). Approached from this angle, the distinctive
feature of Hispanic value judgments regarding the nineteenth-century novel
appears to be the baldness with which the aims of canon formation (and canon
busting) have been presented, with little attempt to disguise their local, parochial
motivations.

[2] One marked exception to this is the interest that has been generated in the
field of semiotics, as evidenced by such studies as Angel Tarrio's Lectura
semiologica de "Fortunata y Jacinta" (Las Palmas: Ediciones del Excmo. Cabildo
Insular de Gran Canaria, 1982) and Maria del Carmen Bobes Naves' Teoria
general de la novela: Semiologia de "La Regenta" (Madrid: Gredos, 1985).
WORKS CITED

Abellan, Manuel L. Censura y creacion literaria en Espana (19891976). Barcelona:

Peninsula, 1980.

Alarcos Llorach, Emilio. "Notes a La Regenta." Reprinted in Clarin y "La Regenta"

Ed. Sergio Beser. Barcelona: Ariel, 1982. 22545.

Altieri, Charles. "An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon." Critical Inquiry 10 (1983):
37-60.

Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.

Beser, Sergio, ed. Leopoldo Alas: teoria y critica de la novela espanola"

Barcelona: Laia, 1972.

Brodkey, Harold. Stories in an Almost Classical Mode. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Caudet, Francisco. Introduction. Fortunata y Jacinta. By Benito Perez Galdos. Vol.

I. Madrid: Catedra, 1983. 11-86. 2 vols.

Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of
California P, 1976.

Gonzalez Serrano, Urbano. "Dona Perfecta. Novela original de Perez Galdos." El

Imparcial [Madrid] 31 July 1876.

Goytisolo, Juan. Disidencias. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977.

Graff, Gerald. "The Politics of Anti-Realism." Salmagundi 42 (1978): 4-30.

Guillen, Claudio. Literature as System. Princeton, Princeton UP, 1971.

Gullon, German. La novela como acto imaginativo. Madrid: Taurus, 1983.

------. "Problemas del pluralismo critico: Perez Galdos: `Fortunata y Jacinta.'"

Hispanic Review 49 (1981): 183-95. Gullon, Ricardo. Garcia Marquez o el olvidado
arte de contar. Madrid: Taurus, 1970.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,

Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Kermode, Frank. "Institutional Control of Interpretation." Salmagundi 43 (1979):

72-86.

------. "Novels: Recognition and Deception." Critical Inquiry 1 (1974): 103-21.

Kronik, John. "The State of the Art: American Contributions to the Appreciation of
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Peninsular Literature." The American
Hispanist 2.18 (1977): 2-4.

Menendez y Pelayo, Marcelino. "Contestacion del Excmo. Sr. D. M. Menendez y

Pelayo [a Benito Perez Galdos]." In Discursos leidos ante la Real Academia
Espanola en las recepciones publicas del 7 y 21 de febrero de 1897. Madrid:
Establecimiento Tipografico de la Viuda e Hijos de Tello, 1897: 33-96.

Mendoza, Eduardo. El misterio de la cripta embrujada. 7th ed. Barcelona: Seix

Barral, 1982.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose. La deshumanizacion del arte y otros ensayos de estetica.

Ed. Paulino Garagorri. 3rd. ed. Madrid: Alianza, 1984.

Pardo Bazan, Emilia. La cuestion palpitante. Ed. Carmen Bravo-Villasante. 2nd.

ed. Salamanca: Anaya, 1970.

Percival, Anthony. Galdos and His Critics. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.

"Revision de Galdos." Insula 82 (15 oct. 1952): 3.

Rivkin, Laura. "Seeing, Painting, and Picturing in La Regenta." Hispanic Review 55

(1987): 301-22.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1979.

Rutherford, John. Leopoldo Alas "La Regenta " London: Grant and Cutler, 1974.

Scholes, Robert. The Fabulators. New York: oxford UP, 1967.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. "Contingencies of Value." Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 135.

Stark, John o. The Literature of Exhaustion: gorges, Nabokov, and Barth. Durham:
Duke UP, 1974.

Tintore, Maria Jose. "La Regenta " de Clarin y la critica de su tiempo. Barcelona:
Lumen, 1987.

Turner, Harriet S. "Vigencias de Clarin: Vistas retrospectives en torno a La

Regenta." Arbor 116 (1983): 379-402.

Urey, Diane F. The Novel Histories of Galdos. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

Valis, Noel M. "Benito Perez Galdos's Miau and the Display of Dialectic." Romanic
Review 77 (1986): 415-427.

Valls, Fernando. La ensenanza de la literatura en el franquismo (1936-1951).

Barcelona: Antoni Bosch, 1983.

~~~~~~~~

By HAZEL GOLD Northwestern University

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